Rockbox 3.0 Release Announcement
May 29, 2006
The Rockbox Project (http://www.rockbox.org) is proud to announce the release of
version 3.0, the result of years of extensive development.
Rockbox is a GPL open source operating system and application suite for digital
audio players (DAPs), written from scratch to be fast, stable and packed with
features. Rockbox is replacement firmware that has matured to become an
extensible, flexible platform that provides a plug-in architecture for adding
applications, utilities, games, PDA functionality and more. The core Rockbox
feature set includes gapless audio playback, extensive codec support, a five
band fully parametric equalizer, on-the-fly (OTF) playlists, Replay Gain
support, a customizable user interface, lossless recording (if hardware supports
it) and more. Rockbox also includes a voice-driven interface suitable for
operation by visually impaired users.
Rockbox runs on a wide variety of devices with very different hardware
abilities: from early Archos players to modern high resolution color iPods and
iRiver players with digital optical audio hardware and advanced recording
capabilities.
- What's New?
*New platforms*
Due to extensive architectural rework, in addition to the Archos players
supported in previous releases Rockbox now runs on the modern generation of
devices that perform audio decoding in software.
The new devices supported in this release are:
iRiver H1xx series: H110 (iHP-110), H115 (iHP-115), H120 (iHP-120), H140
(iHP-140)
iRiver H3xx series: H320, H340
A number of iPod models and the iAudio X5 players are in development and working
(but unsupported). Support for Toshiba Gigabeat and others are currently in
early stages of development.
*Audio Codecs*
On software decoding platforms, Rockbox now supports playback of more than 9
audio codecs, rivaling many PC-based audio player software packages.
Supported codecs:
MPEG audio (MP3/MP2/MP1)
Ogg Vorbis
Musepack
FLAC
Shorten
Apple Lossless<
WavPack (lossy and lossless modes)
AC3 (DVD audio)
WAV/AIFF
MPEG-4 AAC (LC) and Windows Media Audio playback support (both non-DRM) is
currently in development.
*Recording*
On supporting hardware, Rockbox supports high quality lossless recording to
44.1kHz, 16 bit WAV. Recordings can be compressed on-device with the MP3 or
WavPack encoder plugins. Rockbox features on-the-fly gain adjustment and visual
peakmeters with clipping notification. AGC and other recording tools are in
development.
*Games*
In addition to cutting edge audio support, Rockbox also includes many game
plugins.
Rockboy Game Boy emulator (supports original Game Boy and Game Boy Color ROMs)
Rockdoom (A port of the PrBoom Doom engine)
Pacbox Pac-Man arcade game emulator
Brickmania, Chess, Jewels, Sudoku, Solitaire, Minesweeper, Pong and many others.
Rockboy, Rockdoom and Pacbox require third-party game data files not included
with Rockbox.
*Internationalization*
Support for Unicode (UTF-8) has been added, and internationalized fonts for
several non-Latin character sets are included. Rockbox correctly reads and
displays Unicode ID3 tags. The user interface supports 28 languages.
*Documentation*
There is now a comprehensive manual for every supported platform available in
PDF, HTML and LaTeX format. Each manual includes documentation for the entire
supported feature set and example screenshots.
*Other*
Rockbox now features a rewritten tag database called TagCache. This allows
browsing and searching of music files by artist, album, genre and so on.
The low level buffering and playback engine has undergone significant
refactoring for better stability.
On non-Archos devices, Rockbox features a five band, fully parametric equalizer.
A JPEG viewer plugin is included that displays in 16-bit color and 33-shade
greyscale. It works on single files and in slideshow mode.
Many more custom themes and WPSes have been added.
For a comprehensive list of changes, see the CVS changelog at
http://www.rockbox.org/since25.html and the wiki page
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/MajorChanges .
- Who Makes Rockbox?
Rockbox is being developed by hundreds of highly skilled volunteer developers
from around the world. More than 175 contributors are named in the credits but
many more in the user community provide a steady stream of patches, ideas and
bug reports. To participate, see the Rockbox Forums (http://forums.rockbox.org),
the mailing lists (http://www.rockbox.org/mail/) or chat with us in IRC
(#rockbox at irc.freenode.net).
Rockbox includes code from many other free software/open source projects
including MAD (http://www.underbit.com/products/mad/), Tremor
(http://www.xiph.org/), ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/) and others. The
developers would like to extend their thanks to these projects, for without their
work, Rockbox would be a much lesser product.